Paradox
by knightshade
Summary: General Hammond has a lot on his mind knowing that SG1 has gone back in time. Set during 1969.


Title: Paradox  
Author: knightshade  
Rating: PG  
Disclaimer: I don't own Stargate or any of its characters. Sadly. Because I'd like to own Jack. Sorry, just saying.  
Spoilers: Season 2 Ep _1969  
_Summary: General Hammond has a lot on his mind knowing that SG-1 has gone back in time. (Set during 1969).

Author's Notes: Thank you so much to Nutty for the beta read and the obsession.

**Paradox**

It hadn't clicked at first. It was funny how a man could wait his whole adult life for something and then nearly miss it. Not that he would have missed it – not really – but he had cut it close. He knew that Captain Carter had suffered a small injury on PJ2-445, but Dr. Fraiser signed off on the minor injury reports. She was a competent doctor and he trusted her. As far as he was concerned, he had better things to do than look over her shoulder at all the bumps and scrapes. So it hadn't been until they'd all sat down at the briefing table for the mission to P2X-555 that he'd actually seen the cut on Carter's hand and his blood had run cold.

He'd finally caught up to the moment in time that led to their first meeting.

Hammond had considered not sending them. He had no way of knowing if the information he sent back with Captain Carter would be enough to get them home. Not that he ever knew they were going to come home when they disappeared through the gate. Every time could be the last, but this time he knew going in that there would be trouble. He didn't like sending his people into trouble unless he had to, but part of him felt like it was ordained. It had happened in his past because in the future he'd made it happen. What came first? He'd tried to work through some of the metaphysical details with Carter when he'd set her to studying 'alternate' uses for the gate. But he'd had to be careful about how hard he pushed the issue in order not to arouse any suspicions. She'd explained the grandfather paradox to him, but the thing that kept tripping him up was how did anyone know what was a change and what was the way it was supposed to be?

He, as young lieutenant had helped the team, but only because his future self sent him a note – but only because he knew from having lived it already. When did time start? Was it a fluid river that was always flowing past the same point? These were the things he'd tried to ask Carter. She'd gone off on a tangent trying to explain that there was a theory that time was just a series of different dimensions. At that point his eyes had glazed over. Maybe she understood it, but he certainly didn't. Instead he just came to terms with the idea that it had happened in his past so in some way it was meant to be. It wasn't for him to understand the hows or the whys. He was a soldier. It was his job to listen to the people who did and act.

So he let them go with nothing but that slip of paper. Carter had said it was an important feature of the grandfather clause not to tell anyone anything. Hammond didn't know exactly what the consequences might be, but he figured he'd rather be safe than sorry – especially when sorry might land him in a mental institution. He'd kept quiet about the four strangers he'd risked his career to help and the strange stories from his brief time with them. He never quite forgot the pain of getting hit with a zat gun or the strange golden imprint on the big guy's forehead. He'd been fairly confident when he saw pictures of Jack and Daniel in the reports on the first mission to Abydos that they were the ones. But memories had a tendency to get hazy over twenty-five years. It was the first time he met Carter – the second time really – that he was certain. She'd made quite an impression on Lt. Hammond – a woman in the military who outranked him. And a beautiful one at that. It wasn't a common sight in those days.

Looking back, they'd given him a lot of clues about the future, grandfather paradox or not. He didn't think it was possible to meet something from the future and not have it change the course of a person's life. He had been toying with the idea of getting out of the service, but not after he heard the words 'general' and 'Hammond' spoken together. And knowing ahead of time that women were going to be in what appeared to him to be a frontline unit probably gave him a leg up on his peers. He'd come to accept the idea in his own mind long before he ever dealt with women under his command.

Meeting the team so long ago had been a huge help to him with Teal'c too. It had been risky, trusting him to be on SG-1, but he'd met four people all those years ago – a team, working together. He got the sense that they trusted each other, even in the very brief time he was with them. It gave him the confidence to fight for Teal'c, knowing that that was how it was supposed to be.

In a way, he was disappointed that this day had come. He'd never counted on the future being immutable, but it had often given him hope. There were times he'd believed that something had changed the future and what had happened in his past would never really happen in his present – or at least not in the same way. But it was funny how each time he thought that the future had been changed, something happened to set things right again. Even in the darkest times that knowledge left little glimmers in his heart that some way, some how things would work out. The four of them were supposed to be an intact team at some point in the future. As long as he knew that, he had hope every time something went wrong, and every time one of them was in danger.

Now he was as blind to what the future held as everyone else.

Hammond felt a little diminished by that. He didn't even know if they made it back. When he'd come to after the zat blast, they were long gone and the efforts of the Air Force to find them were futile. They disappeared completely, which was a good sign in his book. If they had gotten stuck in the past, he was sure he would have heard something. They would know when they left their future world. If they'd been trapped in his time, he expected he would have heard from them telling him not to let them go. Or even if they were stuck but were happy with how their lives had turned out in his time, he was sure they would have let him know that they were okay. Jack wasn't one to slavishly follow rules.

No, they must have found the gate and gone somewhere. He just hoped that somewhere was here.

All this time, he had wanted to tell them about the strange day he'd first met them, but he'd kept the secret. He lived a life of secrets; this one wasn't even the hardest to keep. But all along he'd hoped that some day they could sit around the briefing room and laugh about it. He wanted to give Jack a hard time for shooting him with the zat and ask Carter those questions about time again – this time without the vague generalities that got in the way of the crux of his questions. He wanted to hear Daniel and Teal'c's impressions of the era he grew up in. He wanted to finally include his people on the secret he'd kept for so many years.

George stared down at the ring in the darkened gate room, willing it to turn. They'd gone somewhere.

He hoped to hell it was here.

-------------------  
-knightshade  
January 5, 2007


End file.
